Server and I/O Virtualization Vs Cloud Computing (part-2)
Date: Tuesday , March 01, 2011
I/O Virtualization Then come the need to virtualize your I/O infrastructure. I/O is always a bottle neck in the progress of computer industry. As the processor speed has grown up over the years, so is the RAM speed and the hard disk and storage technology. Hard disks are replaced by faster flash disks. But what about you network speed, this can not be the same. Everybody wants to download in the DVD speed. So, there is the concept of I/O virtualization and various other technologies around it. TCP/IP played a much bigger role in software communication standards than any other network protocol. Different new technologies had immersed and died also.
A very good example of this is the dying InfiniBand Protocol and Architecture. InfiniBand provides a very high speed interconnect of 2.5Gbps per channel and there can be multiple channels. There are 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x connections available in the market moving the speed barrier to 2.5Gbps to 20Gbps. But they use a whole new hardware infrastructure to make the interconnect, also the protocol stack is different from TCP/IP. Now things are going back to square one and people are going back to good old TCP/IP for a better connectivity solution.
Solutions like TOE (TCP Offload Engine) came into picture whereby the most of the checksum calculations are offloaded to a dedicated ASIC/Chip inside NIC adapter card. While we talk about the technical details of the complexity into the TCP/IP Network driver, as an when the network adapter collects a new network packet it has to make sure that the packet is in good health. So, to make sure of the health of the incoming packet, the already computed checksum is recalculated on the receiving end to compare with the original result. This is very time consuming repetitive task, and hence in modern days network adapters this task is offloaded into the TCP Offload Engine hardware. When computations are directly done in the dedicated hardware it is always faster than doing it in the software using the CPU resources of the host machine.
Along the same line of TO Engine, Chelsio Communications a silicon vally startup provide a solution called “Unified Wire” which transmits iSCSI, RDMA and TCP/IP traffice across the same wired line with the complexity handled by the driver software and the network adapter hardware.
Broadcom, a another silicon vally company has TCP Offload Engine embedded inside their mother board, there by enhancing the capabilities of the Network Card, hence enhances the performance of the overall system.
When it comes to virtualize I/O infrastructure at the corporate level it involves two aspects: virtualize the network intrastructure and virtualize storage infrastucture. In this space too there are a couple of companies working to achieve the same goal. One good example is Xsigo Systems Inc. They have a hardware Chassis which provides the hardware infrastucture for I/O virtualization in terms of virtualized NIC for network resources and virtualize HBA for the storage infrastructutre. So, this hardware chassis provided vNIC and vHBA to Host Servers. Again the host servers can be physical server or a virtualized server just like the XenServer from Citrix. By adding virtual NICs and virtual HBAs one can attain the network speed and extra disk space from attaching to various Logical Unit Number(LUN)s exposed to the vHBA(s). In simple terms, a LUN is a logical entity that converts raw physical disk space into logical storage space, which a host server’s OS can access and use.
Various fancy little other features were also provided in the Xsigo Systems solution like boot the host server using vNIC from the LUN or to install OS in a LUN associated to a vHBA over the vNIC. The bandwidth can be extended with the help of features like NIC Teaming. In a similar fashion storage can be made high available (HA) using Multipathing of virtual HBAs.
Cloud Computing In the Cloud space, Amazon is the pioneer leader to come up with concepts like Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). Amazon already started providing services for High Performance Computing (HPC) also. EC2 is Amazon’s cloud computing platform based on the Amazon Web Service (AWS). EC2 allows users to rent virtual machine and install applications without the hassle of traditional software model. EC2 tries to address the problems of tradition computing like virus, backups and software updates etc. Resources will be rent out to individuals on need basis and on demand basis. This is the fundamental concept behind software/hardware as-a-service (SAAS and HAAS). At the back end EC2 runs on Xen.
Web Services plays the most important role when it comes to Cloud Computing. Provisioning virtual machine is the basic job done by the web services and then managing the virtual machine.
The companies that provide cloud services run web services at the back end to facilitate the services they provide. For example Amazon Web Services is a java based application interface to be used in various applications. The web services plays the role mostly comes when to provisioning the hardware resources.
Every other big companies like Big Blue IBM has their very own cloud firm. A cloud firm is a virtual firm of cloud virtual machines. Any customer that asks for a virtual machine can be provisioned from the cloud firm. IBM has private coulds like podworks, vcell that service internal IBM customers for their own hardware requirement for software development/testing etc. Other companies also maintain their own such firms for their internal usage and internal customers.
There is a company called “deltacloud” sponsored by Redhat. This is an initiative to standardize the cloud web services APIs. Various cloud services company provide different services. Google has planned for Google Cloud Print facility whereby giving the user the experience of legacy print service from the cloud based Google Chrome OS. Google also provide cloud services to individuals having google account for their google doc services, where they can use documents, forms, spreadsheet and presentations. Google also allow uploading any type of file format into their cloud. Storage and backups are very popular cloud services. File synchronization is also becoming a popular cloud services. Cloud based CRM services is becoming very popular now a days and many companies specifically startups are working in this area. Big players like Oracle and SAP are also putting their effort to make their CRM and ERP softwares cloud enabled. Along with these tradional software services some new kind cloud based services has also come up, like remote IT support for computers, servers etc.
Conclusion The cloud computing is new and emerging with service companies are building new cloud based Apps, APIs and further standarzing their APIs to work across clouds. In the same way hardware virtualization is also standardizing the VM image format. VMWare is again leading this initiative. They have come up with Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for virtual machines to that a vm created by one vm creator software can be used by other vm creation softwares, hence enhancing the mobility and portability of VMs. There are many more such initiatives to come in the future and time will tell there this new industry is heading. |